Raven's Cry. Christie Harris
strayed to the wondrous axehead, and the wood sculptor’s eyes grew wistful.
Day after day after day, the raven’s cry woke the village, and it was still an almost empty village.
Then at last the villagers returned. People listened, open mouthed, to the tale of the incredible encounter. They babbled exuberantly.
“You saw the flying canoe!” Haiias accused Yatz. “You saw the Iron Men!” He fumed with frustration and loped along the trail to the open sea again and again to scan the far horizon.
Meanwhile, winter crept towards the village. Visitors arrived for Chief Gannyaa’s potlatch, Yatz’s own family among them. Flames leapt in gigantic cedar houses. Hiellen swirled with color, with the fantastic dances of a vigorous and artistic people who had plenty of food and leisure and a compulsion to excel. Youths whipped up soapberries into a bittersweet pink froth that was piled into miniature canoes for serving; and guests sucked in the rosy dessert from tiny decorated paddles.
The potlatch was indeed the most magnificent gathering the world had ever seen. They all agreed. The enacted “Tale of the Flying Canoe” was the wonder of it. The thunderstick and the axehead were the glory of the gathering, and Yatz was highly honored. He, the people realized, he, a prince of the Sdast’a•aas Saang gaahl Eagles and a future Chief 7idansuu, had been supernaturally chosen to become the world’s greatest carver.
“My heart feels good,” he confided to his young sister Maada.
“My heart sings for you,” she told him, and followed him with adoring eyes.
The only one who viewed the axehead with some alarm was Yatz’s mother. She drew him aside one morning. “That flying canoe could have been the spirit of Kali Koustli,” she said, shuddering at what might have been. She laid a fond hand on her son’s arm, betraying how much she had missed him.
“Pfft!” he scoffed, as carelessly as though the dreadful thought of pestilence had never entered his mind . . . and as though he had never missed her. “Have no concern for me! Only good spirits have come to me with the axehead . . . and a little proper respect,” he added, grinning at Maada and Haiias.
Those two hung on his every word, now. They asked him a million questions. They looked wistfully at the far horizon, then enviously at Yatz.
“Will the Iron Men come again?” they kept imploring him.
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